Time Treasure – Future Tablet Game

I’m a sucker for a good tag line. Gary Hayes from MUVEdesign has put out a teaser video for his upcoming, well 2011 release date, game called Time Treasure. Gary explains more on his blog, but I wanted to add my comments.

Gary says:

Without giving the plot away, the structure of this game is quite straightforward. There are ten layers of time from 2050 back to 5000BC that you slowly penetrate following stories, clues and trails all based at POIs (points of interest, precise locations) around your city. The traditional MMOG talking-head quest and story givers are a unique part of this as well as a range of capture & loot quests that require you in some cases to do a little ‘real world’ grinding… ok not too much For me the challenge as always is about creating strong ‘call to actions’ and constructing a narrative backbone to make it worth your while walking and in some cases running around town! I will do a post when this reaches a full working pilot.

I think this is a terrific idea and I find it interesting he’s planning this on a tablet rather than a smartphone. I’m in agreement that the more immersive games are going to require a bigger screen to make work. On the other hand, I’m not sure how much people will want to hold their tablet up all day, but its worth a shot. Personally, I’m amazed at how much people are willing to hold their cellphones to their ear with their necks bent while they drive down the road. If people want to do it, they’re willing to suffer a little pain.

I also like his questing idea and creating a narrative. Though I’ve been around gaming long enough to know that every developer wants to createnarrative but it’s much harder when you get around to coding.

The other challenge point for Gary and MUVEDesign is making the game work across multiple cities. I suppose you can come up with a general plot that can be dropped into any city, just change the GPS codes, but it’d be nice to get some personal touches from each city’s history.

Overall, I think its a good idea and I hope we see it come to fruition. Good luck, Gary.